Finally some Christmas lights!! The Carson house has been haunting my photographic dreams ever since they put the lights up on it. Problem is, the only free time I have had to shoot it has been while it was raining and my camera is not exactly waterproof... Well, the rain finally cleared up a few nights ago (at least for the night) and I saw the lights on my way home over the Samoa bridge & jumped at the opportunity.
I have been reading up on HDR and looking at examples online for quite some time & thought that the Carson Mansion would provide the perfect subject for an HDR photo, especially with the Christmas lights all strung up. So I grabbed my tripod out of the car, and my cross-screen filter (makes lights have four points) just for fun, and set up everything from 2-3 different locations in front of the house and to the side of it. I used my Exposure bracketing feature on the camera taking three pictures each time I pressed the shutter button (the first at my set exposure, the second a stop below, and the third a stop above) and planned to combine them later in Photoshop using the automate HDR feature. Below are each of the three images before editing:
The more I shoot RAW images the more I love them. That's all for today!
No really, RAW images are the creme brulee of images... Our last few days in GA we went over to a friends house to hang out and the guys ended up re-hashing old times with some flaming irish car bombs. Of course, I was enlisted to photograph this glorious event, all the while thinking "I'm not so sure this is a good idea..."
The kitchen was the only place irish car bombs could be had without catching the carpet on fire or burning his gorgeous hardwood floors. Problem with that was that the kitchen was really dark- on top of that once I did a few test shots (with the camera- not the car bombs!!) I realized that if I wanted to catch the fire coming off the glasses I would need to make the kitchen even darker. Was I worried? HELLS NO!! Why- because I was shooting RAW!!!
Of course, the images were too dark to see much of anything in:
Thanksgiving brings back memories of tables and counter-tops crammed with every food imaginable. I remember how hectic thanksgiving always was trying to make it to everyone's dinners/lunches, which between my dad & step-mom's family, grandma's family, grandpa's family, step-dad's family, and boyfriends family left me pooped everytime. So this year since we were in town for the big headache and belly-ache inducing day we decided to gather everyone together at one house for one dinner. Sounds crazy right? Well, we survived, scratch that- we rocked that thanksgiving.
With all the people around and the different families my goal for the day was to get group shot to give to each of the families, as well as a few random candid shots. Last year I spent quite a bit of time shooting the food so I wanted to focus on the people this year, since I only get to see them once a year!
I shot everything in RAW instead of JPG (now that I have photoshop & camera raw I will never go back to jpg's!!) and then did some short (ie- 5-10 min per picture) editing in camera raw then photoshop to finish them up with the border.
